Saturday, June 6, 2009

Visual Studio 2010. wow!!! Lot of features. What a product from Microsoft. It has almost everything integrated for developing all technologies related to ASP.NET like Silverlight, ASP.NET, SharePoint, WPF and QA related. The version of ASP.NET supporting is framework 4.0. This is again a big change.
We will take a look at the features available in the Visual Studio 2010.
First I am a SharePoint guy, so I will start from SharePoint tools available in Visual Studio 2010.

Till now, we have an option to add a new item for ASPX, ASCX, CSS, JS, Cs etc… Now we have an option to add a new web part project item and the Visual web part designer which loads a user control as a web part for SharePoint. Wow, how cool it is! Pretty much good.

We have another fantastic facility for adding an event receiver for SharePoint List/Library/Site and using the wizard to choose the event receiver type. From this, it will create a source file with that event receiver. [Again no need of creating a special project and write everything manually.]

A special explorer window which will pull information from the SharePoint sites like Lists, Libraries and other artifacts in SharePoint directly inside of Visual Studio when connected to a SharePoint site. It just like what we are seeing the team explorer in Visual Studio 2005/2008 when connected to Team Foundation server.

We have a package explorer to configure WSP files, feature files and other package related files in SharePoint. This is good thinking by the team to keep track of all the solution we are using in a SharePoint site at one place. The key F5 will compile, build, debug and deploy the solution to the specific site or farm depending on the configuration.

Till now if you want to create a SharePoint custom workflow we used to create a C# SharePoint workflow project and configure manually to implement it. But now, in this version they have added an ASPX workflow initiation form to a workflow project.

We already know about the WSP builder. From which we can create the solution file easily without doing any extra configurations etc, etc. Visual Studio 2010 includes the WSP file import to create a new solution automatically.

Second, I like Silverlight technology and development. I will explain the Silverlight features available in Visual Studio 2010.

While creating a Silverlight project you have an option to select the Silverlight version like 2.0 or 3.0

A good and great news for Silverlight developers that Visual Studio 2010 supports for both Silverlight development and editable design surface. WOW!!! this is the best and great feature. Isn’t it? [Thanks to Microsoft. When i am developing Silverlight application I am always having a thought that why MS VS team didn't give option to edit the Silverlight objects in editor inside Visual Studio. If I need to edit any thing I always need to go to Microsoft Expression Blend. But now editor is available inside it.]

More features available with Silverlight 3.0 in Visual Studio 2010. We will discuss this in upcoming blog posts.

Another feature that Visual Studio 2010 is integrated a great module for testing [QA]. You can take a look at it here.

The final feature is very cool feature that the new look for Visual Studio 2010. Very good rich and cool UI and very good user experience. I will come with another post that will give you good information about it with nice screen shots.

I think this information will help you to understand the features about Visual Studio in different scenarios. Keep an eye on the blog for more updates.

4 comments:

I'm sorry but if you're comparing IDEs across all languages/platforms then Visual Studio, even 2010, still has a long long way to go to catch up to IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA. I work with C# and Java professionally and I loathe working with C# not because I have anything against the language, but because Visual Studio feels so crippled compared to what's available in the Java world. Installing Resharper helps, but that's really just putting lipstick on a pig.

Me too worked on different languages and on their related IDE's. But, somehow I really like what features giving me by Visual studio 2010. SharePoint, Silverlight, ASP.NET etc all development in single one and that really decrease development time. So, I give more votes to it than any other one.